September 22nd, 2010
It’s Woodward week in Washington again, and so time to re-read Andrew Ferguson’s amazing analysis of Bob Woodward’s Washington. An instant classic:
One of last week’s Post excerpts began with an account of a small dinner party Cheney gave last April to celebrate the fall of Baghdad. He invited a few colleagues and friends–among them his aide Scooter Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, and Ken Adelman, a former Reagan administration official who had been peppering the op-ed pages with articles supporting the Iraq invasion.
Adelman and his wife, Woodward tells us (as Adelman surely told him), cut short a visit to Paris to attend. “When Adelman walked into the vice president’s residence that Sunday night, he was so happy he broke into tears. He hugged Cheney for the first time in the 30 years he had known him.” Adelman, in other words, is Woodward’s kind of source. When the partygoers threatened to lapse into reverie about the first Gulf war, Adelman interrupted. Woodward quotes his remarks verbatim:
“Hold it! Hold it!” Adelman interjected. “Let’s talk about this Gulf war. It’s so wonderful to celebrate. . . . It’s so easy for me to write an article saying, ‘Do this.’ It’s much tougher for Paul to advocate it. Paul and Scooter, you give advice inside and the president listens. Dick, your advice is the most important, the Cadillac. . . . I have been blown away by how determined [the president] is.So I just want to make a toast, without getting too cheesy. To the president of the United States.”
The passage is fugue-like in its complexity, yet it displays, as plainly as possible, how it is that Woodward’s books expose the truth about Washington. It lies not in the details but in the way the details are acquired, through the capital’s daisy-chain of duplicity, flattery, and guile. Though the quotes that Woodward offers us appear to be direct, they are in fact direct quotes from a source, Adelman, who is quoting himself through a haze of memory and self-congratulation months after the words were uttered, at a party which his host, no doubt, had hoped would remain private. And while it is painful to watch a man parade his own sycophancy, it is dazzling to see it displayed in so many layers: Adelman sucking up to Woodward by describing himself sucking up to Cheney–as a way of impressing his fellow Washingtonians, who may someday, as a consequence, suck up to him.
Genius.
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